I love and hate any Steam sale because it means I'm going to be agonizing over the sheer number of games that I suddenly want in my game library. Even titles I normally wouldn't give a shit about become "must haves" just because they have suddenly become cheaper.
One thing that sort of throttles my impulsiveness is the fact that I don't own a credit card. So I have to email sales and wanted games to my friends who then buy it for and I either pay them later or more often then not pay them up front.
For the current Steam sale however I managed to put $50 USD into my Steam Wallet so I could buy the games I want without being a pain the ass to my friends. Other wise I'm calling people up early in the morning begging them to buy me something before the timer runs out. Regardless of it being an eight hour timer or twenty four hours, if a game I want goes on sales my fingers burn till I own it. But with the $50 USD limitation I have to be very careful about how I spend my money as my friends had allocated their own credit funds for the games they wanted.
So I had two rules which governed my buying decisions.
1. Only buy games that I would actually download and play. Not to buy anything just for "keep sake"
2. If I had to watch a review to convince myself of a purchase then I was better off not buying it.
This generally worked alright for me though there is still about five days left on the sale and I have about $16USD left in my wallet. Those five days of sales mean that there are about 45 daily deals, 45 flash sales and 15 community choice sales left. Now some of these will be repeats but still that is a lot of games.
I have 40 game son my wishlist. I use this list to determine if the purchase of a particular game is going to set me back any. For example if if see a game I want; I can ask myself "What would I rather spend on?" Then going through my wishlist I can see what else might be a potential buy worth holding out for. There are some games on the list like Injustice: Gods among us and Batman: Arkham Origins that will not be a reasonable Steam buy. Even at a fair reduction these games will still cost me about $40 to $60 Fijian. This would be sweet if these were the only games I bought but doing so stops me from buy more games at a cheaper price. One might argue that it could be quantity over quality that I'm striving for but a lot of the games that I have bought for less than $5 USD have already given me hours of enjoyment.
The first thing I bought was "Risk of Rain." This was a title that I had wanted for a while but paying full price for it in Fijian dollars just seemed a little bit much for me. I got it for $6.69 USD which was relatively the same price same as paying the normal price in USD ... kinda. Know what I mean?
The purchases that followed were also mostly indie titles. Super house of Dead Ninjas, Spelunky, La-Mulana. I also upgraded my Farcry 3 to the special edition for extra content whcih seemed reasonable and the only AAA title I bought was Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Ultimate edition. While most of these buys were done because they seemed like good games at a good price, Risk of Rain and Castlevania were two titles that I really REALLY wanted.
Last night though I did my first impulsive buy. I got the expansion for Titan Quest; a game that I've had in my library for god knows how long without ever playing it. But last night I also started playing Diablo 3 again and I was hungry for a dungeon crawler. Upon research I found that Titan Quest was very highly regarded and I figured if I was going to get into it... I was going to get into all the way. I broke my second rule.
I'm thankful that I didn't regret my decision but I have to be careful not to do something like that again. I got lucky with Titan Quest, I played it for the first time this morning and what started with just a "quick look" before work ended up with me playing for an hour and being late for work.
So now I have about $16 left.
I have no idea what to do with it. Now even the games I really want are being nit-picked on because I don't want to risk spending the money only to have something really awesome pop up on the final few days. But I also risk missing out on a great deal only to have nothing I want later on. Plus there is a cut off point to the minimum money I should hold onto. I'm sure anything less than $10 USD won't be much of a buy now since I've already bought all the good "Cheap" games.
I'd love to buy things like Hitman Absolution or Dungeons of the Endless. But that would reduce my Steam Wallet to nothing. If anything I tell myself that I'll pick these games up on the last day of the sale as the prices are valid till the 3rd of January.
But then there's things that I would love to own for the sake of the sale. Like the Bioshock collection or even the Legacy of Kain collection. I would actually download those Legacy of Kain games and play them. There's even Shinobi 3 which is a dollar something but I'm afraid to buy it because it might just put me under a game I wanna buy later.
Another part of me has sort of decided to just buy a bunch of DLC stuff and a few old titles on the final day if nothing else pops.
I'm not sure if you can tell from reading this but the Steam sale has been very agonizing for me. While some people wish for world peace and not to be sold as a child solider, I wish I could put in more money into my Steam wallet before the sale ends.
Am I just a greedy video game pig? I think I might be ...
But his is the Steam Sale... and this is my nightmare.
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